It’s no secret that there has been controversy brewing in the world of high intervention coffees - that of undocumented additions of flavourings during the post-harvest process. We’ve been grappling with this ever since the release of the SCA’s “What’s in my coffee” report earlier this year, and we’d like to publicly state our position and framework for handling these coffees going forward.
In this piece, we’d like to set out our understanding of context - the historical and market conditions that has created this scenario, the values that drive our coffee program and traceability systems, and set out a new category within our offer - with two new coffees released as a pilot program and model moving forward.
Where we start from
We’ve always had one of our key pillars to respect both sides of the supply chain equally - that we place equal value and emphasis on being good partners to the people who provide our coffee, be it producers, exporters, importers, just as much as we place value on doing right by those who trust us and purchase the coffee we want to share.
In support of that pillar, we have always started from the position of examining the upstream supply chain from a post-colonial framework. The history of Coffee is that of colonialism itself - European powers planting seeds, grown by enslaved, indentured or otherwise coerced labour. While many years of independence, liberation, and dismantling of empires has diminished that effect, the structure that was built from it never went away. Reference prices set from commodity exchanges in the global north, standards and contracts written by consuming countries, and the continual extraction of value at the expense of earning livable income, let alone a prosperity price.
As a roastery, we have always tried to be extremely careful how we interact up-stream to prevent the recurrence of neo-colonial power dynamics - reproducing that old power structure by dictating what should be grown, how it should be processed, extracting value at the expense of producers and offloading risk onto those very same. We have always tried to champion those that we work with, sharing the supply chains, being liberal and anti-exclusionary - if we can help create demand and awareness of a supply chain, if every year more and more roasters are also looking to buy from those we work with, and consequently they sell more coffee and/or for a higher price, then we consider that a massive success. We have always been extremely careful about the demands that we place upon those we work with, with a focus on mutual trust and respect.
If, for example, we were to request a processing experiment, we commit to buy it no matter what comes out. We try our best to return year on year to those we work with, even if that comes with consequences of sometimes having an offer that is not “perfect” or only stacked with the crème de la crème of airfreighted microlots.
We manage risk and try to form meaningful partnerships based on trust with those we work with, and we’re extremely selective on that front.
The who, what and how
As part of our sourcing strategy - as you'll see on all of our coffees - we work with maximum detail provided on the extrinsic value of a coffee, as part of that drive to promote those we work with - that is to say the who, what, and how of every coffee.
We are thorough in looking for this information, and if for example we cannot get it from an importer, if we can speak directly to the exporter we will quite happily jump the chain to ask them, and if we can find the producer, we’ll ask directly. That is often the very best outcome, as it allows us to directly ask how they would like us to represent their work and promote their brand to the market here, and it often provides us with the most clarity in the details. Equally, we should mention that we do not believe a producer should need to sell their life story in order to sell coffee. We are focused on the details of the coffee and the farm itself - the provenance that separates any one great tasting coffee from another, the traceable nature that prevents high quality coffee from becoming any other fungible good. We thoroughly dislike the style of writing and marketing copy that focuses on poverty porn, stories of resilience and overcoming adversity that oft champions a roaster as a shining force of good, saving the “poor producer” through the purchase of a few sacks with a premium.
In the hunt for technical information, it has always been an option for producers to keep elements of their production proprietary - we can point to examples such as the Los Manantiales honey lot we ran on espresso from the 24/25 Peru season, where the producer had a specific technique for their mosto/starter culture preparation that they wanted to keep as commercially confidential. Or the same with the Santa Cruz Ozolotepec special preps from the Galguera Gómez wet mill that went into Colourful V14. In these example cases, we transparently reported that elements were kept commercially confidential, and shared what we could around that.
A formative quote in our buyers career was from one Mike Riley, a now retired but at the time Q-Grader instructor and ex-trader from Falcon coffees: “Be on the side of farmers” - as a message to a class of formative Q-graders, it was a simple yet deeply important instruction: Do not go looking for defects for the sake of them, do not look for ways to punish coffees and producers - your decisions matter, your decisions have real and meaningful consequences for the livelihoods of the people in your supply chain. It is a message we have carried forward and permeates the fabric of our buying strategy. We’ve never been washed-coffee supremacists, and have embraced many processing techniques and cup profiles with an open heart and an open mind - faithfully reporting the processing steps as they’ve been conveyed to us.
The income problem, value-add and the cost of entry
What we're facing is a world where: Everyone who agrees with the speciality coffee “mission” agrees producers should be paid more. Ever since the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) in the 90s the actual received income for producers in the majority of the world has been awful, and prior to the latest few years of high C-market prices (the futures market that acts as a price discovery mechanism and benchmark) there was many years where the price of bulk produced coffee was below cost of production, with huge amounts of value capture in the global north at the expense of those that produced it.
Speciality quality was and continues to be one route to profitability for producers - it requires significant investment (far more labour for picking, oft longer ferments, longer time taken to dry coffee to be more stable) but for many smallholders, the prices received were broadly profitable when commercial bulk production was not, and this spawned many, many marketing narratives.
On top of speciality production, there came the concept of value-add processing. Going beyond the standard wet and dry process, as we know them, to adding additional steps to modulate fermentation. Changing the fermentation environment (for example, creating anoxic conditions and removing facultative and obligate aerobes from the picture, and/or forcing yeast to respire anaerobically), heating it up, cooling it down, flushing with gas, extending it, later on inoculating with yeast, both coffee specific (which is really more coffee farm condition specific - LALCAFE yeasts are wine yeasts that have been selected to grow well and produce positive flavour compounds when fermented at 25°C plus) and not - although most commercial beverage yeasts tend to ferment better in cooler conditions and produce off-flavours when fermented hot.
We have always talked about levels of technical intervention in our coffee - that we need to be careful about the framing, especially about the capex required to access some of these value add processes.
Simply put, it would be unrealistic to expect every producer in the world to access a bioreactor, to get frozen Pichia yeast cultures from Danish bioscience companies, to even have the consistent electricity to have a fridge running to store yeast blocks. We are in a world where many smallholders in Rwanda and Burundi do not have consistent access to fresh water near the household (we are aware we stray dangerously, dangerously close the poverty narratives we deeply want to avoid, but this is an example of an unavoidable factual element of the production of cash crops in least developed countries) - where low intervention speciality grade coffees represent a massive win in terms of the impact that speciality pricing brings to the communities that can produce and access these international markets. We've made it quite clear we'll always buy these coffees and we believe that a mutually respectful supply chain can indeed deliver on some of the promises that the speciality narrative sets out - although we never put that as the principle point, as we appreciate Karl Wienhold’s framing - if what you sell is pitched as the solution to a problem, you will never be incentivised to actually solve that problem, lest you put yourself out of business.
Big Flavour, Big Risk
But what about the flipside? Well capitalised producers, who CAN afford the capex to invest heavily in their production and R&D. We saw a rise of this circa 4-5 years ago in Colombia. Producers taking valid techniques from modern winemaking, fermentation labs, etc to coffee, massively pushing forward the knowledge and potential of what has historically been an "orphan" crop - without global north agribusiness style investment, research in coffee is a fraction of what it is for any other crop that we'd grow here, and we don't have the benefit of hundreds/thousands of years of fermentation research to lean on, ala wine and beer.
Again, we cannot emphasise how much of a paradigm shift "fermenting for a specific flavour outcome" is - for the majority of time, and still in the majority of cases, coffee fermentation is a strictly logistical step: get the fruit & pulp off, [or not for naturals] TO help the get the coffee dry (and stable, without introducing defects).
And in many cases, these producers started producing truly wonderful and intense coffees. Yeast fermentation can produce banana, rose, apple, peach, clove, citrus and grapefruit and passionfruit tropicals partly by building aroma compounds from sugars and amino acids and partly by releasing precursors the fruit around the green coffee carried in bound, odourless form. If you want to get precise, that is the creation and release of esters, higher alcohols, thiols, terpenes, lactones, volatile phenols, and carbonyls and organic acids - all of which then act as both precursors for the transformational chemistry of coffee roasting, as well as some which survive the thermal profile and end up in the cup.
So we believed - we saw coffees get elevated, with “believable” and unique cups, we had this very distinct method to get there, there was a limited number of producers with the means so it was rare. And let us tell you - the market on the consuming side responded. These intense, fruity cups sell, consumers and cafes demand more, so roasters demand more, so importers demand more, so exporters demand more, and the producers who could make them made cash. But we run into an issue: these intense, big fruity cups can also be.. kinda boring? they're not subtle, with very little nuance, ending up a bit like a big hit of sugar.
And everyone started looking for the "next lot" - the next big thing, the next differentiation. We had the means and motivation to collectively create a very big incentive to create Big Flavours no matter what - if you are a producer who is struggling for income, if you can produce Big Flavour - then you would be likely going to see a significant return on that.
But precise biochemistry is difficult, expensive, risky, requires specialist knowledge and techniques, isn’t well understood or researched, and not a guaranteed thing - processing experiments can go very wrong, harvests ruined, lots not suitable even for commercial sales (fruity coffee with “unwashed/fermented” flavours is a full defect for many commercial buyers). So Big Flavour by natural means also comes with Big Risk.
Perverse incentives
We used to worry about this - that there is a ceiling to ever more exclusive, ever more novel lots - and if that is your only differentiation? What happens when we hit that point - when we run out of crazy? Can we keep driving ever upwards? The demand side of the market asked that the temperature kept getting turned up, season after season. With each demand to increase the intensity and complexity, the barrier to entry to play in this field - via fermentation alone - was also raised ever higher.
It is a hot topic in the news these days - the concept of misalignment of goals, of the ways that reward functions can produce perverse incentives and outcomes. If competitive pressures have created a situation where one of the most foolproof ways to get clients, international market access, and to build a brand that helps capture more value from that chain was Big Flavour, and there existed techniques that reached the same outcomes at a fraction of the cost or risk, and those employing them are seeing significant financial benefit and plaudits - then it seems the only rational course for any producer would be to try and follow what the very consuming market is seemingly demanding. Remembering that the context for this is a world where, consistently and for decades, the vast majority of small producers have not been able to reclaim the value that their coffee generates once it leaves the farm.
A chain built on trust
Speciality supply chains have always been based on trust - we cannot go and audit every farm we work with, so we have to rely on a value chain that is linked by trust - the importers working with exporters, the exporters working on the ground with the mills, co-ops, producers, etc - to ensure that coffee is traceable and legitimate. If we find serious issues - we drop the supply chain because of the risk - and that is the motivation to keep it honest.
But that trust goes all the way up - if a producer says the coffee was fermented for 48 hrs in open tanks, beyond obvious flavour profile differences, unless you were there to observe the entire outcome we cannot prove it wasn't 24hrs in closed, or 36 hrs under shade, etc - there has to be a degree of trust, that is verified by the farm visits and various logs/paperwork trails that the purchasing of coffee at origin generates (typically by the exporter, which is then packaged up and handed to the importer and then on to the roaster).
It is very true when it comes to this information that if you do not ask, you do not get - we mentioned earlier our tendency to be dogged in looking for technical information, that if requested, it can be found.
And we're eager to support value-add processing - we have bought thermal shocks, bioreactor lots, etc from non-Colombian origins in the last few years. Some never made it to the menu - the heavy processing and long transits via sea leaving the seeds damaged and the coffee faded on landing. Others have been some of our favourite coffees we’ve ever released, such as the Las Etiopes Gesha from Peru. Going hard with high intervention coffee with spontaneous or inoculated fermentations is not a magic ticket to amazing cups - but it is high risk, high reward. Perhaps most instructive - we buy coffees from Ratnagiri estate in India, who have perhaps one of the most impressive processing facilities in the world, if not just outside of Colombia.
Ratnagiri achieves INCREDIBLE things with yeast and fermentation control, and reminds us of the lots back in the day when this all started off - you can taste what they have achieved and that is through legitimate means.
The temperature hits boiling point
What has changed in the last 3 years (since we've been running Scenery, so we’ve been watching samples come in and rejecting an increasing number each season for non-coffee flavours): the techniques that were once the sole provenance of a select few with wild, technically adept setups, are now being copied "en masse" by a greater number of producers. Some with the most basic of setups, no labs, no sterilisation, no bioreactor control tanks - somehow even fruitier cups than those that kicked the whole wave off are produced. And every year the intensity has increased. Like the metaphor of the boiling frog, we believe if this came out of nowhere we'd have entirely wholesale rejected it - instead, the temperature has slowly crept up and up and up and now we find ourselves at a boiling point. It is now clear that a certain amount of processing is occurring “with stuff”, as the SCA report puts it, and in those instances, that “stuff” is quite often not being declared.
To come back to the example of Ratnagiri, who are excellent producers - the only lots they do that is reminiscent of this particular style of boiling point coffee is - quelle surprise, (openly) rose or jasmine infused.
Oh yeah? Prove it.
Per the SCA report -
• Ingredient: Any substance, including food additives, used in the manufacture or preparation of food and present in the final product, although possibly in a modified form.
• Contaminant: Undesirable substances that have unintentionally entered food throughout a portion of the production, handling, storage, processing, or distribution of a product.
• Adulterant: Intentional substitution or addition of a substance to a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product or reducing the cost of production, for profit.
With those definitions - the only thing that separates an adulterant from an ingredient is disclosure. When it comes to adulteration - the undisclosed addition to processing, the problem has quite frankly been: there has been no concrete, easily accessible way to test for it.
You can submit a coffee for GC:MS (Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) testing to look for certain molecular fingerprints, at significant cost per sample, however unless you know what you're looking for ahead of the test, it is a needle in a haystack - and there are ways to avoid being detected by this technique, for example using naturally in-coffee compounds instead of obviously outside of coffee/artificial flavourings - for example, those very same aromatic compounds that can be found in the coffee fruit and produced by yeast.
We're actively engaging & following the work of groups looking at developing rapid tests for adulteration - NIR is one potential route, but it has a lot of potential flaws with the training and signals the model produces, and there are groups developing rapid chemical tests that can be deployed in the field. We are eager for these to come to the market, both as a way of rapidly testing green lots - which means they can be flagged for GC:MS testing if required, but crucially for re-establishing trust in the supply chain. If we cannot prove it, and they do not want to disclose how they achieved it - we are left with someone in the global north flinging unproven accusations of fraud at those in the global south, and if done publicly this could mean a significant loss of income.
Much like the death penalty - where no matter what, however you structure the system, eventually someone innocent will be put to death, which is why in most civil society we do not have it even for the most egregious of crimes - a producer who is innocent of adulteration being accused of such is a totally unacceptable outcome.
One of the reasons we have taken the time to set out our position on this controversy is we see producers far outside the scope of this issue being caught inside the blast radius - any value add processing from any origin is now seen as suspect, we have even observed consumers concerned that a fruity Kenyan washed - with that legendary blackcurrant cup - that it might be “infused”. It is a classic example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing because it is just so egregiously wrong as to me laughable, if the consequences were not so dire - and so the longer we find these witch hunts continuing, the more damage is done to those who do not deserve one iota of blame.
But we cannot at present force that disclosure - we are actively engaging with our supply chains, and evaluating the answers we are receiving according to the wider context we are aware of. The thing that's become very apparent to us, especially from the rise of more producers choosing to wang stuff in the tanks, is that it isn't a magic bullet.
You cannot add “strawberry” flavouring to bad green (be it picking, variety, plant health, etc), bad fermentation and expect it to be delicious - it becomes very obvious. Good agronomy, good base level fermentation - with just the “right sprinkle” added - produces cups that are Emphatically Delicious. Actually, the subtler it is, the harder it is to pick up on it - which is where it starts getting very dangerous with flinging unproven accusations because they cross-over with unadulterated, emphatically delicious cups.
It isn’t a magic bullet, it still takes skill
Our take is that this is still an artisanal product - because it takes skill to produce. It's speciality coffee, but with additions - that can produce a differentiated, non-fungible (a crucial aspect that separates speciality from commercial coffee) quality result.
It often won't be until someone messes up and puts too much in the tank and you see the man behind the curtain.
Rather than post-roast flavourings - which often see low grade commercial coffee blasted with singular note flavourings, these coffees integrate the base level green coffee character, the flavours that come from the fermentation of the green, and the flavours that are unlocked via the roasting transformational chemistry - delivering far more complexity to the end cup.
We are told that rather than just add singular flavours to coffees, producers engaging in these practices - indeed mastering them - are combining multiple, tweaking these blends to be complimentary to the coffee itself.
Coffee is under-regulated when it comes to this: There is plenty of legal advice on how to handle ingredient disclosure if you are the operator that is adding flavouring, post roast, but almost nothing if you become aware of up-stream additions. We have communicated with the British Coffee Association to ask them if they are engaging with the FSA on this, considering it is an ongoing, active and growing problem for speciality. As far as food safety is concerned with coffee, we're expected to ensure no foreign objects, moisture and water activity below mould risks, that we are able to back up specific claims of origin, and we're given an exemption from providing nutritional information provided the ingredients are 100% arabica/robusta, etc - as coffee is a <2 calorie beverage, effectively.
Coming back to how we're dealing with this moving forward: It seems that the actual product - coffee “with stuff” is insanely popular in the global market. However, the fact that it has resulted in Coffee “with hidden stuff” - is quite rightly a situation that nobody wants.
Producers don't want to add stuff if there isn't an incentive for it - after all, it increases their cost of production (as a literal cost of an extra input)! If a lot does not sell, it will not find a commercial buyer with a cup profile like that.
Coffee with stuff that's proud of the stuff added, treated like a "blueberry donut stout" or "iced mango tea" or a “Peach lager” etc - with full disclosure, pitched appropriately? That is something we'd like to explore, and have written this post to accompany a pilot project with that exact situation.
Coffee with stuff - a pilot project and new model
Via discussions with Juan of KWC (@knowwherecoffee) an indie exporter based in Colombia and the US that does small direct export to roasters around the globe, we covered this thorny topic and how they were handling the issues covered in the SCA report. Juan mentioned that producers such as Franky Hoyos were willing to be open about how the sausage is made - the addition of flavour extracts to the yeast culture, and that Franky is open that indeed it is not easy to get the additions correct to enhance the final cup profile.
We want these two releases - a Pacamara and a Gesha - to be a pilot project, and a demonstration of our intentions and expectations around coffees in this genre moving forward. If we put a fun, ultra-high intervention coffee on the menu, if it’s got “stuff” in it - it needs to be open and proud about it, or we need 100% guarantees that no flavouring adjuncts were used during the post-harvest process, and we can now start to look towards testing that can potentially provide verifiable results beyond he-said/she-said.
If a coffee turns out to contain undisclosed inclusions, we have to be prepared to drop supply chains as a result. Making demands - like “stop adding things to your fermentations” risks neo-colonial power dynamics - so we make no mandates there. But equally we can say that disclosure is a condition of sale to us.
There are known knowns - who produced a coffee, what is it, and the general sense of post-harvest processing. Then there are the known unknowns - processing steps can be proprietary - the 11 herbs and spices, the exact recipe for coke, the exact yeast used, the mixture, the bioreactor settings- and we’d continue to transparently report that, as we do, when elements have been withheld for commercial purposes. But we cannot accept unknown unknowns - when elements are withheld, and we do not know about it.
We’ve given it our best shot at working out the appropriate language for this style of coffee - as flavour extracts were used as a step during post-harvest processing but not post-drying or post roasting, we’ve categorised it and clearly shown in the processing as “+ Adjuncts”
In brewing, adjuncts describe additional ingredient inclusions to a fermentation outside of the core recipe (for coffee this could be green coffee with or without the fruit, a microbial population, water) for the purposes of influencing the final beverage outcome. In brewing these adjuncts can range from non-traditional grains, to spices, fruits, flavourings, and elements that modify the texture or characteristics of the final product. We think this is the best model to be used for these styles of coffees and that they have their place, when done correctly.
Take the pot off the boil.
Right now, fulfilling the market demand for ever more intensely sweet, fruity and consistent coffees has produced a perilous outcome. There are witchhunts against certain farms, producers, processing techniques, even countries - and that mob attitude is spilling out onto innocent producers in the process. This situation provides every incentive to therefore not disclose the use of these ingredients unless we can prove that it is fine to do so.
We must work hand in hand - both to re-establish trusted, verifiable supply chains - but also to create a market demand for transparency. The market demand for transparency must specify a reward function at least equal to the pressure and income that was created towards ever increasing intensity and novelty, rather than punishing those who declare what was added while continuing to pay, without question, those who stay silent about the same thing. If disclosure costs a producer the sale and silence secures it, the reward function from the market has already been specified and no volume of asking on our part will change the answer we get back.
We believe that these coffees can be delicious, artisanal products that take skill to produce, and clearly people have been enjoying the end cup profile - and will, we hazard, continue to do so with the understanding that exogenous elements were used during processing to achieve that specific outcome. If, however, people don’t want to buy it once they know how it is achieved, but that they were happy to when it was believed to be a special sort of magic - then we think we have a wider comms problem to sort out as an industry. But something has to change, that much is clear
We want to celebrate Franky for being willing to disclose the use of adjuncts in this processing, as well as the admission that it is difficult to get it right. These coffees are fun, eponymous of type, and are especially good at bringing people into the world of speciality coffee. We worried, in 2024, that these lots were going to crush the value in traditional processing and styles - we are reassured to see that is not the case. We hope all styles of coffee can co-exist and producers are able to both create and capture value that results in a good life, and we will continue to operate our buying program accordingly.